A fun spin on serious cosmic stuff! Wendell C. Perry has 40 years experience studying astrology and how it impacts personalities & relationships. He's written two books & published articles in astrology magazines. He's happy to share this website so that you, too, can have fun with astrology to help you in everyday life!

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16 September 2017

The Baby Boom Blockade

In the webinar I did for Kepler College last week I discussed the way in which voters from the two (astrologically speaking) Baby Boom generations continue to dominate U.S. politics. These are the generation born between 1943 and 1956 (with Neptune in Libra and Pluto in Leo) and the generation born between 1957 and 1970 (with Neptune in Scorpio and Pluto in Virgo.)

The first wave of Baby Boomer began having impact on culture and politics quite early. This is the generation that brought about many of the social changes of the 1960sand early 1970s. However, as time went on they became a divided generation. Neptune in Libra gave them a vision of the world in which everything was fair and equal, but, even though fairness is a wonderful ideal, it doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

On issues like abortion, affirmative action and taxes this generation split, with each side of the claiming that the other side was being unfair to someone. With Neptune in Libra, this was an idealist generation. With Pluto in Leo, it was a self-important generation. So the argument settled into a permanent, partisan divide that has dominated American politics ever since.

The second wave of Baby Boomer flew under the radar for a long time. They were not “discovered” until 2004 when a pollster working for the Republican Party learned that Boomers born after 1956 were much more conservative than those born before. This generation of Boomers had remained aloof from politics for a long time, but the 9/11 attacks in 2001 had changed all that. With Neptune in Scorpio, emotions like fear and anger activated this generation.

In 2004, Republicans predicted that this newly discovered second wave of Baby Boomer would allow them to stay in power for the next fifty years. With the first generation of Boomers split, this second wave (even though it was smaller than the first) would give them a reliable majority. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 put a crimp that prediction. But Obama was born in 1961. He was a member of this second wave of Boomers. They helped him get elected twice, but they hadn’t stopped leaning to the right. Polls showed that members of this generation also made up a sizable portion of the Tea Party movement.

Now it appears that what the Republicans predicted in 2004 has come true. Conservatives dominate the state houses in a majority of states. They control the Senate, the House and the Presidency. The blatant fear mongering that came out of the Trump campaign last year seems to has cemented his position with the second wave boomers, while the conservative half of the first wave boomer seem willing to hold their Neptune in Libra noses and hope that Trump’s election will allow them to impose their own version of fairness.

Keep in mind, that I’m talking about generations here, not individual people. As I say whenever I discuss generational astrology: No one is or should be a perfect representative of his or her generation. Generational astrology is general. It’s about social and political trends and the predominate characteristics of large groups of people.

The big problem right now is that that the Baby Boom generations were both large, larger than any of the generations that have come after them in the U.S. Also, thanks to advances in medicine, they are bound to hang around and continue to dominate the political scene for a long time.

That’s a summation of what I talked about in the webinar. What I didn’t have time to discuss are the ways that this conservative Baby Boom blockade might be overcome. In my next entry, I’m going to address that issue.